(CNN) – A day and a half after a shooting rampage in California left six victims dead, Sen. Richard Blumenthal said Sunday the tragedy serves as a reminder of the legislative efforts to stem gun violence that occurred in the aftermath of the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting.

The Democrat from Connecticut, appearing on CBS’s "Face the Nation," said statements from the California victims' families bring the nation back to "when it seemed like we were on the verge of, potentially, legislation that would stop the madness and end the insanity."

(CNN) - Rand Paul is defending his relationship with Mitch McConnell after helping his fellow Kentuckian defeat a tea party-backed challenger in a GOP Senate primary.

"I came out of the tea party movement. I'm very concerned about the debt. I'm very concerned about big government," Paul said on Friday. "But I think the misnomer is to think somehow Senator McConnell isn't. That's what his whole entire career has been predicated upon - fighting against big government."FULL POST

(CNN) - Police charged three more men in connection to the blogger who's been accused of taking a picture of Sen. Thad Cochran's wife in her nursing home bed and creating a political video against the longtime senator from Mississippi.

Authorities on Thursday arrested Mark Mayfield, an attorney and local tea party leader, and Richard Sager, an elementary school P.E. teacher and high school coach, according to The Clarion-Ledger newspaper. Police also charged a third individual, John Beachman Mary, but did not take him into custody because of "extensive medical conditions."

(CNN) - Kentucky residents awoke Wednesday to a new wave of negative campaign television commercials.

They're just a taste of things to come over the next five months in what's already a very ugly and expensive Senate contest. When it's all over in November, the Bluegrass showdown could break records and become the most expensive Senate campaign in history.

(CNN) - The judicial nomination of a former Justice Department official, who has drawn the ire of senators on the right and left for legal memos he wrote justifying the killing of an American terrorism suspect overseas with drones, is expected to clear a major hurdle on Wednesday.

Senators are likely to break a filibuster of Harvard Law professor David Barron to be a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, which is based in Boston.

Washington (CNN) - Saying that "No one should be able to pump unlimited funds into political campaigns, whether they are Democrat, Republican or independent," Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid on Thursday strongly backed a proposed constitutional amendment that would limit campaign spending by outside groups.

Reid announced on the Senate floor that the Judiciary Committee would soon hold a hearing on the amendment, introduced earlier this year by Democratic Sens. Tom Udall of New Mexico and Michael Bennet of Colorado, and that the full "Senate will vote on that legislation."